by Tim Parks
The police had finally let us go. At last, after three hundred kilometres of expensive and quite unnecessary escorting, we were free and making good speed, beyond Pescara now, where the road along the Adriatic is a long series of tunnels and high viaducts. Until, at one in the morning, as the laughter dies down from this nth joke about queers, always with the punch line repeated amid cries of ‘Get it, Dio boia, get it, did you?’ the coach stops in a tunnel and the driver turns off the engine. Hazard lights are flashing all around. We’re stuck.
After a few minutes we pile out and start walking. Only fifty yards or so further on, we come out of the tunnel and on to a spectacularly high viaduct. Over the rail to the right is a drop of perhaps two hundred feet. A hundred yards ahead, the road disappears into the next tunnel. But between the two mountains, in the centre of the bridge, is a truck, on fire. There are no vehicles around it, and there doesn’t seem to have been an accident, but in the stiff breeze the thing is sending flames up thirty or forty feet into the night, and so fiercely that no one is going to risk squeezing past it. Gathering together at the head of a small crowd, the brigate immediately strike up one of their perfectly synchronised chants: ‘Sangue, stragi, violenza sempre più, brigate gialloblù, brigate gialloblù.’ Blood, carnage, more and more violence …
‘Move back,’ a policeman shouts in a Sicilian accent. ‘It might explode any moment.’
It certainly looks like the kind of thing they set up for a movie.
‘If it explodes, can we shout “Re-load”?’ Pista screams.
They are being deliberately childish now. Hellas didn’t lose. The ref gave Bari a penalty ten minutes from the end and we didn’t lose. The boys reacted.
The rest of the crowd are amused. The policeman is angry and shouts at us.
‘Oh, can you repeat that in Italian?’ Glass-eye says. ‘Butei, the policeman doesn’t speak Italian.’
Rising to the bait, the policeman begins to say, making an effort now with his accent, that he will arrest us for insulting a public official.
‘Oh the monkey does speak Italian,’ Glass-eye shrieks, and already the others are dragging him away before the policeman can get through the crowd to him.
The truck burns on. The flames are intensely orange in the dark night. Apparently it is a vehicle that runs on GP gas, and its tanks have blown up. When the boys hear that the trailer is loaded with grapes, they strike up with a completely innocuous song, ‘How nice it is to gather in the grapes with la mia bella.’ A dull explosion has everyone running back. ‘Re-load, re-load!’ Pista is shrieking. The truck’s doors have blown open. We fall back and stand watching. We’ve been here half an hour and still the fire brigade haven’t arrived. Will I ever get home from this trip?
‘This wouldn’t happen up north,’ Cain assures me. ‘Up north, the fire brigade would have been there immediately.’ I ask him where Fondo is. ‘Why isn’t he screaming, In the truck there’s a bomba?’
‘He’s asleep. Fondo’s a sick boy,’ Cain says soberly. ‘When he comes off his highs and realises what he’s doing to himself, he gets so depressed he just starts drinking again.’
‘Does he have a job?’
‘He lives alone with his mum. His mum adores him.’
Cain is obviously sad for Fondo, he knows Fondo will not stay the course as he has.
‘Pray for us to get home, Parroco,’ somebody shouts. ‘Pray for the flames to die down.’
‘The one time’, Cain says, ‘we behave like angels, and this has to happen.’
When the coach finally gets on the move again all the boys at the back begin to chant, ‘Sborra, autista, sborra.’ Sborrare is a dialect word that means ‘to come’ and not in the sense of coming and going, to and fro. ‘Come, driver, come!’ Coming, I reflect, is precisely what none of these young men have done this weekend. Such are the sacrifices of the away game.
It’s getting on five in the morning when the coach pulls up at the Zanzibar. As it slows to a stop, a swarm of beer cans rolls up the aisle. After one more half-hearted chant of Hellas, the brigate break up and wander off into the dawn. One by one cars accelerate down the wide sensible street, ignoring the traffic lights. We are ordinary people again.
Then, before I know it, my wife is shaking my arm: ‘Wake up, wake up, Tim. There’s the visit to Villa Vendri,’ she says. She doesn’t know how late I got home. The visit is at ten. They’re opening up a private stately home nearby for public inspection. The tour is limited. We have booked and paid. I have to go. If I don’t go we will fare una brutta figura.
Half an hour later, bleary with sleep, my mind throbbing still to the rhythms of the coach, the strangely compulsive rise and fall of those dialect voices, I stand on the steps of a Renaissance villa looking out across driving rain on statues and stucco. ‘Come, driver, come!’ ‘There was a complicated ongoing quarrel between the various branches of the Giusti family,’ the guide is saying, ‘the Tuscan branch and the Veronese branch, that is, and then between the family as a whole and other families from other parts of Italy. Someone was cheated. Someone was knifed in the back.’ The guide pauses. ‘Times were more violent then than they are today.’
‘Stragi sangue violenza sempre più,’ my daughter Stefi sings when I get home. She’s twelve. ‘Did they do that one, Dad? What songs did they sing?’ The tune, I finally realise, is taken from the refrain to ‘Yellow Submarine’. ‘All the boys’, Stefi giggles, ‘stand up and sing it as soon as teacher leaves the room.’
‘So what did you learn?’ Michele asks more seriously. He means about our prospects, the team, can we avoid relegation? Can we dream? ‘After twenty years in the Veneto,’ I tell him, ‘I finally understood how they pronounce Dio boia. And the team’s not that bad either.’
Giove Pluvio
I’ve dressed in blue and yellow, now I’ll put on the mythical scarf (twenty-one years old) and so off to the curva. Avanti bluu!
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‘HURRY,’ MICHELE SAYS. He’s meeting me off the airport bus. ‘For God’s sake, Papà. We’re late.’
I’ve just got back from Paris where I attended a festival entitled ‘Écrire l’Europe’. I must, I tell myself, stop attending literary festivals. Arranged by the Ministère de la Culture to celebrate the French Presidency of the European Community, Écrire l’Europe was nothing more than a complacent charade, staged around the pathetic pretence that the authorities take writing ‘seriously’. What would it mean, I wonder, for a government ‘to take writing seriously’? Are we going to ask our leaders to read books?
By great good fortune (for the organisers) the Nobel prize for literature was announced the day before the festival and the winner, a Chinese dissident – already his difficult name escapes me – turned out to have been resident in Paris for many years. He was thus available to be fêted by the French Minister for Culture at the opening reception (champagne and canapés) though his writing has nothing at all to do with Europe and quite understandably he hadn’t originally been invited.
‘A piece of China is European,’ the Minister declared, ‘indeed French!’ she added, standing beside the beaming and bewildered winner. ‘A piece of the Nobel is French!’ Clearly, I thought, the Brigate Gialloblù are not the only ones with an obsessive sense of pride in place. And, while people milled and looked solemn and bored, this elegant, ambitious woman began a substantial speech saying how much she admired the Chinese writer’s commitment to human rights. Writing, at public festivals, is always construed as something committed to human rights, a sort of genteel, largely unremunerative branch of liberal politics. ‘Pissing is a basic human right,’ Glass-eye had screamed. ‘My rights have been trampled on,’ Marsiglia told the newspapers. The minister had probably never heard of the oriental Nobel until the day before yesterday. As I had never heard of our Brazilian striker Adailton till the day we signed him.
In any event, I found it embarrassing explaining to these well-meaning people that I had to abandon the festival ear
ly for a football game. I had to leave on Sunday at dawn. In a Parisian café I logged on to www.hellasverona.it but for some reason couldn’t get The Wall to work. Was it the sticky mouse? For days I haven’t been able to open The Wall. Why? Is access to The Wall a basic human right? ‘You’ll miss the main presentation to the public,’ my French publisher worried. ‘You’ll miss the closing banquet,’ one of the organisers regretted. Where was my ambition? Where was my appetite? Pray God that plane isn’t late, I was thinking all the way to the airport. It’s the first home game of the season. The rain was heavy and the mist thick.
‘Come on, Dad, for God’s sake, we’ll never find a seat!’
L’Arena has announced that the curva is sold out. Considerably taller than myself, handsomely blond and blue-eyed, my son hurries ahead, entirely focused on the game, irritated by the irregularity of having to meet me from the airport. The station where the airport bus arrives is just a quarter of a mile from the stadium. People are streaming through the streets. ‘We’ll never get a good seat.’ He is anxious, excited.
But I have to make a detour. I have to find my car and leave my bag in it. It’s parked beside the canal which turns out to be full to the brink, a swollen muddy flow leaving no space at all between itself and the low road bridges. I’ve never seen it like this. ‘We’re going to miss school, Dad, if the Adige gets any higher. It’s been raining non-stop.’
My son, it seems, sees an eventual flood as a chance to spend more time playing computer games. In FIFA 2000 he has bought Beckham and Zidane for Verona. We are six points clear at the top. A place in the Champions’ League is assured. Dream on. The sky above us, as we join the crowd, is dense and blurred. Flying through it, less than an hour ago, the small propeller plane was all over the place. I still feel seasick.
We wait in line. The other side of the turnstiles, the police are confiscating cigarette lighters and loose coins. Once, when my wife was away, they confiscated two clothes-pegs in my pockets. I tried to explain that I always stuff my pockets with pegs when I am hanging out the washing, because I find it difficult to keep turning to the peg-bag while holding damp underwear on the line. ‘My wife hates to lose good pegs,’ I protested. But if the police don’t fill three or four tubs with small hard objects, why are they there? And how many Italian men hang out the washing?
Then the rush up the stairs, the purchase of the plastic flag, the squeeze through the broad corridor, past the bar, serving alcohol-free beer and espresso, and at last out through the tunnel into the great spectacle of the stadium.
‘There,’ Michele groans. ‘It’s all taken.’
We usually sit towards the edge of the curva, above the corner flag to the right of the goal.
‘Move!’ I tell him. ‘Go! There are still a few gaps.’
‘Just people holding places for friends.’
My son is the most stubborn and instinctive of pessimists, something I thank him for, since it stimulates a rare optimism in his father. This can be particularly important after you have attended a get-together like Écrire l’Europe.
‘Go!’ We stumble over steps and seats and feet and are halfway across the section that ends in a high spiked fence, when a voice calls, ‘He là! He là!’ Pietro has saved seats for us.
I know almost nothing about this man. He must be thirty-something, tall, curly-haired, bright-eyed with a large, comically square chin of the kind usually associated with the Australian outback. Throughout the game he sits forward, rubbing his hands together with excitement and nervousness, rolling up his programme tight and beating it on his wrist. ‘Dagliela bene!’ he always yells. ‘Pass it well!’ Inevitably the shout comes after one of our players has given the ball away. Pietro shakes his head. Sometime early last year I found myself embracing him after some particularly unexpected goal. Since then, unasked but profusely thanked, he has always held seats for us. Still, I never imagined he would do this the first day of the new season, after a three-month break. I can’t understand why we are privileged in this way.
The other man Pietro holds a seat for is a sharp-looking chain-smoker with Latin dark features, black shiny jacket and black shiny wraparound glasses. They speak in dialect. They are old friends. I can only assume that they are amused by the way I occasionally break out into English imprecations, by the fact that I take the game so seriously despite not being Veronese. Certainly more seriously than any government takes writing. In any event, we like each other.
‘Ciao Pietro! Ciao tutti!’
All the familiar faces are there. The pessimist. The boy with the copper hair. The two women to our left. They are always there, at least half an hour before the game. Once, in spring, when the days grow longer and schedules change, Mick and I got the time of the game wrong and arrived an hour earlier than usual, which is to say almost two hours before kick-off. Pietro was already there, already in the exact seat he always likes to take, with oceans of empty space all around.
‘How early do you arrive?’ I asked him.
‘Early.’ Then he added, ‘Very early.’
‘But why?’
‘Eager,’ he said.
‘I bet you’ve been thinking of this game all week.’
The man has a charming smile. ‘You bet you.’
Another day, killing time before the game, fresh from reading one of those pieces of Sunday newspaper research that claim that men think about sex at least once every thirty seconds, I asked him, ‘About how often do you think of football, Pietro, I mean, our relegation prospects, the players, the goals, the next game? While you’re at work, for example, how often do you think about football?’
‘About every thirty seconds,’ Pietro said.
Today he says, ‘It’s been a hell of a long time, no? Three months. Olimpiadi di merda. God knows what the team will be like.’
‘I went to Bari,’ I told him. ‘We weren’t that bad.’ At once I’m aware of boasting.
‘Bari!’
People are turning round. They can’t believe I went to Bari. Eight hundred and fifty kilometres. They want to know what the game was like. They listen attentively. And Mutu? And Gilardino? What about the penalty? I can see I’m going to be treated with greater respect this year.
‘Did you watch the nazionale?’ Michele leans across to ask Pietro.
No sooner was the season finally started than it was interrupted for a week to let the national Italian team play a couple of World Cup qualifiers against Romania and Georgia.
‘Couldn’t be bothered,’ Pietro says. He’s the fifth or six football fan who’s said this to me. ‘No, we were in the mountains picking mushrooms,’ they say, as if this were sufficient explanation. ‘No, I had to go and watch my daughter play volleyball.’ They would never miss seeing Verona for such trivia.
A journalist called me up from Gazzetta dello Sport to say he was preparing a book on the great teams of the last thirty years and had I followed Hellas Verona in the miraculous 1985. I had to admit, not without an old chagrin, that I hadn’t. I hadn’t had a son as an excuse at the time. I couldn’t plead family matters and male bonding. To avoid the memory of one of life’s great missed opportunities, I ask him, ‘What do you think of Trapattoni’s Italy?’ The national team has a new coach. ‘Couldn’t care less,’ the sports journalist says. ‘I’m a Genoa fan.’
‘I was going to watch the Romania game,’ Pietro says. ‘But when I saw Mutu wasn’t playing, I couldn’t be bothered.’
It’s two weeks, then, since Verona’s debut and perhaps the only interesting piece of news meantime is that The Wall, the fans’ chat line, has indeed been closed down. The man sitting in front of Pietro confirms this. At once, I ask myself: is this related to the developments in the ongoing case of Luìs Marsiglia?
Plausibly, there are other reasons. With the change of sponsors, from sausages to high tech, the club’s website will have to be restyled, just as the thousands of plastic season tickets, already produced, have had to be redesigned and produced again. The manufacture of
dreams is not exempt from tiresome details, and in this sense the long delay of the first home game has no doubt been a godsend. It also gave the team the chance to make a last-second purchase of another under-twenty-one star, Emiliano Bonazzoli.
But despite the announced ‘restyling’ (an English word the Italians love to use), Net Business had promised that they would keep The Wall open so that everyone could go on sending messages like: ‘Pastorello bandito, keep your money, funerals are expensive!’ Except that in the few days before it mysteriously shut down people had begun writing abusive things about Marsiglia. ‘Grazie Marsiglia, ebreo di merda’, for example. Perhaps the powers-that-be have decided to remove this space for anti-Semitism until the case blows over.
The abuse was sparked off by the discovery that the Religious Instruction teacher never had a degree in theology, that there never was a fire in the library of the university of Montevideo and that the letter from a Uruguayan priest and professor claiming that Marsiglia had taken his degree was a fake. Interestingly, it has been the church authorities, not the police, who have been making the appropriate investigations. Having done so much to help the man, they feel betrayed by his public renunciation of Christianity. Inevitably, the more facts emerge to suggest that Marsiglia is not quite what he claims to be, the more the press insists, and rightly so, that none of this remotely excuses a racist assault.
Racism is very much on Italy’s mind at the moment, particularly the more middle-class, ostensibly religious variety known as Catholic integralismo. The sentiment is best summed up in a suggestion made two weeks ago by Bologna’s Cardinal Biffi that Italy should accept only Christian and preferably Catholic immigrants, since the country is in danger, the cardinal fears, of becoming predominantly Muslim.
